—A child is missing, Mr Bickers; a child under your care.
—I know that … Christ, I know that…
Derek Bickers has never changed his stance on what happened with the drugs and alcohol, nor his views. Whilst he had his detractors – and there were many – he also had his supporters. There were interesting columns in some of the left-leaning national newspapers that supported Bickers’ view, the most famous one making the point that Bickers was acting truly in loco parentis and should be admired for it. The words of this same article were used by the tabloids in order to make the point that Bickers was some sort of monster. Indeed, with his grey beard, perpetual shorts and love of the outdoors, Derek Bickers was an easy caricature: a ‘loony’ left-wing parent who let his kids do what they liked. Derek Bickers’ high standards of morality and the empowerment that he allowed his daughters have been overlooked, which is a shame.
I talk to Derek about this for a time, but even today, his view has not changed. I admire that, and we could dedicate much of this episode to a debate about the subject. However, I don’t feel that this should be the focus of the podcast. However, in my opinion Derek Bickers and Sally Mullen were acting in the best interests of the young people in their care. Of that I am in no doubt.
Listeners to Six Stories will come to many different conclusions and have differing views; of that there is no doubt either. I, however, want to concentrate on the events that led to the disappearance of Tom Jeffries and the discovery of his body a year later. I steer the conversation with Derek Bickers back to the group dynamics we were discussing earlier.
—There were two more young people in the group that day, weren’t there? Aside from Eva and Anyu.
—That’s correct; Brian and Tom. Like I say, there were only five of them.
—Can we talk about Tom first?
—Yeah…
—Is that ok?
—Yeah. Sure. It’s just…
—You don’t want to speak ill of the dead?
—That’s correct. I wouldn’t. I mean, I have no reason to speak ill of Tom. But … it’s not like he was a horrible person or anything. It’s just…
—Would it perhaps be an idea to briefly mention Brian first … to provide context?
—Yeah … yeah. That makes sense. If that’s ok, I mean…
—It’s fine. Whatever’s easiest. I think if you tell us a little bit about Brian, it might help us understand your view of Tom.
—Yeah, you’re right. OK, Brian … what can I say? Brian was a good lad too; they all were, but Brian was … I’m not sure how to put it. He wasn’t like the others; he didn’t have the same confidence. He was…
—Weak? A victim?
—I wouldn’t use those words, but in a way, yes. I suppose you could say that. I would say Brian was a ‘follower’; he was a ‘lame’…
—What do you mean, a ‘lame’? Was that what the others called him?
—Sorry, no. I’m talking sociolinguistics here. There was a study done by a guy called Labov in New York in the sixties – about speech patterns in social networks. I won’t bore you with the details, but he distinguished a pattern within these groups. There were the group ‘leaders’ who socially ‘controlled’ the use of language in the group. I’ve worked with kids for a long time and I’ve seen it; there’s the leaders—
—In terms of Rangers, were the leaders Charlie Armstrong and possibly Eva?
—Possibly. Although, if we’re using Labov’s terms, I’d say Eva and Anyu were ‘secondary’ members, in that they belonged to the group, but had little control of the group norms. Then there were the peripheral members, or as Labov named them, the ‘lames’: these were the members of the group who were in some ways ‘detached’, be that ideologically or geographically. Labov’s study was about language. He found that the ‘lames’ used less vernacular than the group and were, therefore, less likely to invoke any sort of linguistic change.
—So, you said Brian Mings was a ‘lame’?
—Only in that he seemed like an ‘outsider’. He never seemed to become part of the group – the total opposite of Tom Jeffries.
—Let’s stay with Brian for now.
—OK. Look, Brian was no different to the others. Not really. He just … OK, so Brian Mings joined Rangers not long after Anyu Kekkonen. He was from the private school over the way and didn’t know any of us. His mum knew Sally, I think, something like that – they worked together, maybe? Anyway, Brian was getting bullied in school. It was bad; his mum was going spare. He didn’t have any friends; his dad was long gone – alcohol, mental health, something like that. And I guess she thought that Rangers might be good for him.
—He was bullied?
—Yeah, I think so. I didn’t really know. It didn’t matter. I just remember thinking that the outdoors, and Eva and the rest of them would be good for him. The kids, they’re good people; kind. They would accept him. Which they did … until…
—Until Tom Jeffries joined?
—Yeah. Until Tom came along.
Brian Mings’ mother never turned up to a Rangers meeting; she dropped Brian off at the church hall near the Bickers’ house the very first time and left him to make his own way after that. Brian, unlike the others, was awkward and a little insular. He had, as Derek says, been the victim of bullying – not just in secondary school, but all through primary. It was fortunate that Sally Mullen knew his mother, and I do not doubt Derek’s assumption that hanging about with other kids his age – Eva, Charlie and Anyu – was good for him. During his first few years with the group, Brian’s confidence grew and grew – to the point where he went from more or less mute to actively, and sometimes rather raucously, helping plan the excursions and trips with the others.
—For Brian, I think the meet-ups were a bit of a release. I think he felt he could be himself with the rest of them. Sure, he was a little immature and actually a bit of a pain at times; Brian could be very vocal, very insistent with his views. But we all understood that. He’d been kept silent for so long, Rangers was the place where he could be ‘heard’ and all that.
Brian came with us on every trip to Scarclaw Fell. He did rock climbing, canoeing, orienteering; loved it. It was great to see him, actually. You could see the happiness in his face. Like I said, he was on the periphery, yet he was still part of the group. It made me sad sometimes; I sometimes wanted to tell him to stop it, you know? Stop being so desperate to fit in. He even started dressing like them a bit; you know, wearing big boots like Charlie, growing his hair, that sort of thing, bless him.
—Then Tom Jeffries came along?
—Yeah. Then Tom joined us and the dynamic was … different, let’s say.
—In what way different?
—This is hard. Tom Jeffries wasn’t really like the others. That’s not to say he wasn’t welcome or anything. We were inclusive, we didn’t discriminate. We’re not that sort of group! We weren’t that sort of group.
—Can you explain what you mean by Jeffries not being ‘like’ the others?
—I’ll try. Look, I don’t know the ins and outs of teenagers – the labels they like to hang off themselves: hippies, punks, all that nonsense; whatever they like to call themselves – I still don’t!
—Are you saying Tom Jeffries was not your typical sort of kid?
—Yeah; that’s a good way of putting it. So, Eva, Charlie, Anyu – even Brian – they were all, let’s say, ‘individual’ in terms of their dress sense, what music they listened to, all that. When Eva was younger, she used to get a fair bit of stick in school; nothing too serious, and she could handle it, she wasn’t overly bothered. You know about Charlie don’t you? Well, he was forever getting in trouble at his school for his hair or his uniform. There was talk that he had a tattoo, that he’d done it himself or something. I don’t know; I never saw it.
As far as we were concerned, none of that mattered. As I said, at the heart of it all, these were smart, sensible, mature kids.
Sorry. I know I
’m going on again. It’s been, what, eighteen, nineteen years since it happened; but that doesn’t make it easier, it really doesn’t…
—Just take your time.
—So …Tom. I mean, it wasn’t like he just came to us off the street. His mum was a friend of … someone’s, like I said, the group was bigger then – it had a wider network, and we knew her, Pat Jeffries. I think she was looking for something positive for Tom, something that would distract him, take him away from all that other nonsense he had got caught up in…
This ‘nonsense’, as Derek calls it, was a little bit more that it sounds. A lot more, in fact. Perhaps Derek wasn’t told about the extent of it; perhaps he didn’t believe it to be significant. However, he’s right to say that Pat Jeffries was trying to guide her son in a different direction from the path he seemed to have chosen.
As Derek states, Tom Jeffries wasn’t like the others in terms of appearance or behaviour. In school (Tom attended the same private school as Brian Mings but moved in very different circles to Brian), he was more of a follower than a leader.
If we’re sticking with Derek’s sociolinguistic analogy, Tom would have been a ‘secondary’ member in the groups at his school. He hung around with the kids in the years above him: the nearly bad kids; not the outright thugs and bullies, but the weed smokers, the shoplifters, the dealers; the ones whose cousins would turn up after school in their cars, Cypress Hill throbbing from the windows.
In 1993, when Tom Jeffries was nearly thirteen, he was involved with a minor disturbance in which three boys threw coins at a homeless man. The other boys – aged seventeen and nineteen – were charged with assault. Tom Jeffries, who was alleged to have been the third boy, denied any wrongdoing and was never charged. There were other things too, floating like slow-moving predators in the murky waters of Tom Jeffries’ past: rumours, things that could never be proved, things that ultimately, in my belief, tainted the national outpouring of grief that would have occurred if, say, Eva Bickers or Anyu Kekkonen had died up on Scarclaw Fell. I ask Derek about them.
—What did you know about Tom when he started coming to the meetings?
—Look, I take kids as they come. There’s no nonsense with me. If they want to start dicking about, that’s when we might have a word. But I don’t believe in treating anyone any different because of some supposed reputation, alright?
—Did you know about the incident in 1993 with the homeless man?
—I did. It came out at the inquest, but, yeah, we knew about it before. That was three whole years before Tom joined us, though, to be fair.
—Did you know about the other things Derek? The fires?
—Look, when kids like that come to us, we don’t screen them. Pat Jeffries was very open about Tom, about the sort of stuff he’d been getting up to. Coming to knock about with us was a clean slate for him – that’s how we saw it, anyway. It’s not like he killed anyone or anything. He was just a bit of a wayward lad. That’s all.
Tom Jeffries, to be fair, did not have that much of a reputation in the area. First of all, Tom came from a well-to-do background, as did Eva, Anyu, Charlie and the others. The incident with the homeless man, to my knowledge, was not repeated. Yet Tom was well known, amongst his peers at least, for being a little bit into fire. He’d come close to being excluded from school for setting fire to a pile of exercise books on the school field one lunchtime, and using a can of deodorant as a flame thrower. Also, his attitude to girls could be thought of as ‘unhealthy’; although you could also argue that it was simple teenage preening. Tom often boasted about his vast experience with girls and women, who were always older than him.
There are some people, who we will hopefully talk to in later episodes, who maintain that there were other reasons that Tom Jeffries joined the group. These reasons will become clearer when those others tell their stories. Derek Bickers certainly did not know about any of this.
—As far as I knew, Tom Jeffries was an average lad; just another teenager. He was fifteen years old, for Christ’s sake. What’s a fifteen year old going to do?
—Where was Tom in terms of your Labov analogy? What was his status in the group?
—Now, that’s interesting. As I’ve said: when new members join, our kids are very welcoming, very accepting; and they were with Tom.
—Brian knew him from school, right?
—Yeah, so there was a bit of familiarity, there. I think Charlie knew him a little bit too – friends of friends, something like that. It was interesting, because Tom just seemed to slip in, and gain ‘leader’ status, without any effort at all? He liked Charlie, and like the others, was a bit in awe of him. And then Tom swiftly became Charlie’s right-hand man.
—Why do you think that was?
—I honestly don’t know. We didn’t listen to their conversations; we didn’t know what had gone on. It was probably something to do with cigarettes. You know what teenagers are like. Tom and Charlie both smoked regularly by then. Something to do with that, I imagine.
—And drugs, and drink too?
—Very possibly. I don’t know.
—Tom Jeffries attended one other trip to Scarclaw; is that right?
—Yeah. He went once before. It was a much larger contingent, then: about ten kids, and six or seven adults. It was a winter trip; there had been snow, loads of it, up on Scarclaw, so we thought it’d be fun. There’s some good places for sledging up on the other side of the fell, near where we do rock climbing.
To reach the spot Derek is talking about, you have to drive. As the fell rises the woodland becomes dense and wild. There are signs showing where some of the mineshafts appear; but there are plenty of places where there are no signs at all; where the full extent of the danger is not indicated. The adult leaders didn’t permit the kids to go past the very specific boundaries or fences. The rock climbing was overseen that weekend by independent instructors who were friends of one of the other adults.
—What can you remember from that weekend in winter? Just in terms of Tom and the others?
—Well, not a lot, to be fair. As far as I recall, their behaviour was impeccable. Like usual.
—What about in the evening? At night?
—What about it?
—Well, we were talking about dynamics before; did you notice any difference, with Tom there?
—Look, like I’ve said, we trusted them. We didn’t get involved. Maybe we should have. If there had been a problem, I know they would have told one of us. I just know…
‘Maybe’. ‘Maybe we should have got involved’. It’s the issue some say the inquest pivoted on. I think Derek Bickers’ views on his leadership and care of the young people is clear by now. Like I say, he has been acquitted of any charges and of any wrongdoing. However, by his own admission, there was a lot that Bickers didn’t know about the dynamics of the group; possibly as a consequence of his hands-off approach. Possibly. But don’t all teenagers – even impeccably behaved ones – hide some things from their parents? Remember, Eva is Derek’s daughter. I don’t blame him for wanting to give her her privacy during the Rangers trips. A bit like a teacher whose child goes to the same school – there’s a certain distance it’s wise to keep.
I fully expect Derek to slam the phone down and refuse to speak to me when I mention the next aspect of what happened at Scarclaw Fell. It’s a touchy subject, but if we’re going to discover what really happened up there, it’s something we’re going to have to breach.
—Derek, we need to talk about Haris Novak…
There is a long and terse silence after I say this. So long, in fact, that I think Derek has either hung up or is just lost for words. Finally, he speaks, and his voice finally reflects his age.
—Yeah. OK. There’s no getting away from it, I suppose. I’ll tell you what I know…
—Wasn’t it the kids who ‘discovered’ him … as it were?
—I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know how they came across him, who ‘discovered’ him; what went on. I ha
ve no idea. All I know is that none of them told us about him; and they should have done. They bloody should have done…
As was widely reported in the media at the time, the prime suspect in the disappearance of Tom Jeffries, other than Derek himself, was a local man called Haris Novak.
Novak, at the time of Jeffries’ death, lived nearby – in the village of Belkeld on the other side of the fell – and spend a lot of time in the woods. The newspapers, especially the tabloids, were quick to speculate about what he had to do with Jeffries’ disappearance. Why, they asked, was a thirty-odd-year-old hanging about with teenagers? The photographs of him – looking much older, with his camouflage clothing, wild beard and thick glasses – made him look predatory. That, or a survivalist. Novak, however, was neither of these things, and proved nothing but helpful during the inquest. No charges were brought against him at any point. Not, as Derek well knows, that any of that mattered.
—All I know about Haris Novak was that he was a recluse, a loner, a bird enthusiast. He had hides and tents all over the fell. He knew where the mineshafts were, all that. Of course he was a suspect; he was a perfect fit.
—Did you ever believe Novak had anything to do with it?
—No. And he was proved innocent, wasn’t he? He had an alibi that night, didn’t he?
—Did you, or Sally, or any of the others ever think he did it? At the time, I mean?
—Look, we didn’t even know about him until the police brought him down from the fell. We didn’t even know he existed.
Six Stories Page 4